1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multilayer ceramic capacitor and a method of manufacturing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
A multilayer ceramic capacitor, a laminated chip electronic component, is a chip-type condenser installed on a printed circuit board (PCB) of various electronic products such as imaging devices (or video display apparatuses) such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDPs), and the like, computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable phones, and the like, to charge and discharge electricity.
A multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC), having advantages such as compactness, guaranteed high capacitance, and ease of mountability, may be used as a component in various electronic devices.
Recently, as performance of portable smart devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs, and the like, has been enhanced, a driving speed of an application processor (AP) handling calculation has been increased.
The increase in a driving speed of an AP requires a current having a higher frequency to be promptly supplied to the AP.
An MLCC serves to supply a current to such an AP.
Thus, in order to promptly supply a high frequency current, an MLCC having low equivalent series inductance (ESL) may be used or an MLCC may be embedded in a board to maximally reduce a distance to the AP therefrom.
However, using an MLCC having low ESL may trigger a different problem in terms of structure, so recently, research into an MLCC embedded in a board has been actively conducted.
Meanwhile, as portable smart devices are reduced in weight and thickness, a thickness of a board in which an MLCC is embedded has also been reduced.
In general, an embedded MLCC is designed to be thicker than a board core by about 3 μm.
A thickness of a currently used board core is less than 100 μm, so an MLCC is required to have a thickness of about 130 μm. However, recently, as the thickness of a board core has been reduced, the thickness of an MLCC has also been required to be reduced
In order to reduce the thickness of an MLCC, a thickness of a ceramic body, an external electrode, and a plated layer should be reduced. A thickness of the plated layer may be maintained to be at least 5 μm or greater in consideration of an error in via processing through a laser when an MLC is embedded, so a method of reducing a thickness of a ceramic body and an external electrode may largely be used.
Here, a reduction in a thickness of a ceramic body may reduce the strength of the ceramic body. Thus, an excessive reduction in the thickness of the ceramic body may cause cracks in the ceramic body due to sintering shrinkage stress and plating stress concentrated on end portions of an external electrode. In particular, a generation frequency of cracks may be increased when a ceramic body has a thickness of less than 80 μm.
Patent document 1 below relates to an MLCC including a ceramic body including a plurality of dielectric layers and internal electrodes, and external electrodes, but without disclosing a ratio between a thickness of a ceramic body and a thickness of a band of an external electrode. Patent document 2 relates to an MLCC including a ceramic body including a plurality of dielectric layers and internal electrodes, and external electrodes, but without disclosing a ratio between a thickness of a ceramic body and a thickness of a band of an external electrode.